Sleep had come to Spring, though it did not belong there.

Myrddin advanced alone through the stillness of the Wyrdwood and found even the birds sunk into slumber. Drowsiness had descended, and with it a sacred silence that brought disharmony, reducing the promise of the branches to the ghost of leaves. There had never been such lethargy in immortal Spring before, but the season had traded away its show of splendor for somnolence.

King though he was, even Myrddin was tangled in threads of torpor and his own sudden awareness of the presence that incited them. Why here, why now? Father?

Yes.

With the feeling of acknowledgment came a summons Myrddin could not deny, though he wanted to. No other being was so perilous to him, had ever cost him so much, as his own father. And now, now that he finally had Kas for his own…

Neither the time nor the place of the visit pleased him, but Myrddin could no more deny the summons of the one who had sired him than the buds could refuse the spring.

His heart clenched. Had he regained what he’d lost only to have it taken away? Kas. All his desires were bound up in the single syllable of that name. He would not give his lover up again, no matter what demand the god of the wild had for him.

Myrddin found his father at the heart of the forest, wrapped around its most ancient oak. He knew it was his father, but Myrddin had never seen him like this. As the Stag of the wood, yes, carrying the moon in the spaces between his antlers. As a mist, or in a man’s shape, but like this?

The god of the wood had come to him as a dragon. His father was a moss-backed beast with leafed and feathered wings whose span stretched beyond Myrddin’s sight. He was the wildest and most beautiful of his kind Myrddin had ever seen, but he was a dragon all the same.

Did that mean…he was no longer a god?

There was a shiver in the branching pinions, a sibilant trembling of feathers. A sound like silk being stretched too tight and too quickly snapped through the air as the great wings beat once then settled.

“Father…” The dragon opened his mouth and breathed out the scent of somnolent blossoms, but not a single word in answer. “Father?”

He resisted the urge to go to one knee as he resisted the drowsy pressure of the air, a sudden urge to yawn. Silence greeted him. More than before, stronger the closer he came to the unsteady orb of his father’s eye. He recognized the source of the unnatural sleep with a familiarity that reminded him of his own long-vanished past.

‘My little shoot.’

Not his father’s voice, but the memory of his mother’s, brushed Myrddin with a faint prickling of dread. This sleep was akin to his own lost winter slumber. The sleep that had taken him at Samhain each year, before Spring had had a rite, or a kingdom… When winter had come to him as to the blossoms and dropped him down the well of the sleeping season.

His father blinked one enormous eye, and the flickering facets drew Myrddin in. The eye became a world, a universe in the shape of an ochre orb. “I forget who I was before the birth of this moment.”

Understanding came to Myrddin not in words but image-emotions. Foreign thoughts expanded across his consciousness in a blur that was reminiscent of his Spring vision and the madness that had brought it.

“I have lost the way and from the hollow places of the world, the languor and silence of the sacred spaces, I hear fear and fever, and ever fewer the voices that once were mine.

“Where are the new peoples? Where is the new god who is only a new name, given to what I am and always have been? The land where first I was worshiped has gone under the sea, and now what remains of the old ways has become overgrown in the minds and memories of men.

“The Spring is a harbor of whispers. I hear rumor from the root of the world. I see the shadow of the future casting its long fingers through time, but it is all silence to me.”

Myrddin experienced his father’s awareness in the inner sharing, a hush of rites that quickened the speed at which many things hurtled toward nonexistence. The offerings that remained did not belong to his father under any name. Sacrifice had turned to prayer. The old accords with the land and its gods had become a plea for intercession with foreign power, the Christian God.

“I don’t understand. Why now? Why would you come to me now, when it’s too late for anything to be done?”

The dragon opened his mouth, but this time it was for a panting rumble of laughter.

“You don’t even have speech left, do you? How is that amusing?”

The whole of his father’s presence spoke to one reality, one truth.

Sleep.

The great jaws parted and the flower-scented breath came tinged with iron. “Boy. Must be born. Must be.”

It was a terrifying confirmation of all Myrddin’s hopes and fears. Jade leaves lashed at him. The billion facets of his father’s eyes glinted with immutable silence.

Wild god, dragon, he curled again around the primeval oak. As he did so, Myrddin’s own shape shifted, not under his will but his father’s. Spring stag, Spring son, he went closer and caught a breath of beast-language, neither divine nor mortal, but in between.

“It is in your hands now.”

In the moment after, the silence of the Wyrdwood was returned to its usual chatter. The birds made their endless music, and Myrddin wondered if the stillness had been for him alone.

Already his father was fading into echoes, the shape of him subsiding, feathers into leaves and grass. The roots of the tree were become like the subtle magnificence of his flesh—or was it his flesh, which shared the gnarled grain of the living wood?

Myrddin wanted… He didn’t know what he wanted. To be free of the oppressive suspicion that his whole world was already only a memory. A dead thing. He needed to be anywhere but where he was, feeling his own heartbeat struggle against the pressure of sleep. He hadn’t experienced anything like it since—when had it been?

When mother died. When my mother—

Myrddin turned and ran as the thought came to him, ran like a child from the serpentine whisper coiled in his mind. He ran straight out of Spring and into the soft warmth of Britain’s summer, then over the water toward the wide, dark wood where Autumn waited its turn.

The warmth of his lover’s kingdom embraced Myrddin pleasantly for the first time he could remember. He swept through it in a rush, his thoughts too distracted to appreciate the ease of his passage.

“Kas, where are you?”

The Autumn wood liked to make its roads spiral, lead away from where one wanted to go instead of toward it, but the moment he said Kas’ name Myrddin felt hands on his shoulders and turned into an unexpected embrace.

“Kas. Always sneaking up on me. I missed you, so I came to find you for myself.”

If Kas was startled by his urgency he didn’t show it, only slid his hands up into Myrddin’s hair and pulled his head back so he had no choice but to lift his mouth for Kas’ kiss.

Even that was enough to soothe Myrddin, for the first time since…their golden age. Their summer. But the autumn had already come. They’d had their spring, their strawberry time, and now the summer was past, and the sweet taste that had lingered with it.

His lover bent to scrutinize him as Myrddin dropped his head to Kas’ chest. “Something wrong, Merlin?”

He shook his head, rubbing his cheek on Kas’ chest. “Just looking at you. Remembering. You haven’t changed.”

Kas lifted an eyebrow. “No. Nor you. Even if you might like to.”

Myrddin traced the line of Kas’ torso with his fingertips and watched the muscles contract beneath his skin. “I don’t want to change. I want to be what I am, that’s all. Whatever that is. When I was a child I wanted to grow up, so I did. But all at once, not like boys do, or should. It taught me a lesson.”

The hint of a frown bent the corners of Kas’ lips downward. “I do not like the sound of your sadness. Is it nostalgia that moves you? The way we are together after so long? Is it me?”

Again, Myrddin shook his head. “All those things. None of them. I…was just thinking of what it was like when things began between us. You were innocent then.” He followed the ‘V’ of Kas’ pelvis with his fingers, down to the smooth, soft skin of his inner thigh. “Innocent of pleasure, innocent of pain.”

Warm hands tightened at Myrddin’s hips. “Never that. I was only without words for what I was feeling. To know the name of things, or not to know them, neither changes the things themselves.”

Myrddin traced the curve of Kas’ cock and it stiffened under his touch as Kas reached up and brushed his index finger over one of Myrddin’s nipples. “Even so. I still think you were innocent. The way death is supposed to be.”

“Is that what you think?” Kas closed his fingers around the dark, tight peak he had teased into stiffness, tugged, then rolled it back and forth.

“Yes—oh.”

“But you are wrong. About me and about death. There is no innocence in the ending of things. Only in their beginnings.” He slid the tingling warmth of his hands down, down, down, then stopped. “That is the truth, my hawk. You are the innocent one. So much so that you gaze at me and see what you cannot interpret in yourself.”

“Kas…”

“Perhaps that is why I wanted you the moment we met. Why I was so drawn to you—why I have always been, will always be unable to resist you.” He bent closer so that his breath brushed Myrddin’s ear. “My only selfishness. The one desire I cannot put aside.”

“Kas.” The beat of his heart sped faster, a pounding he could feel in his throat, behind his eyes, in his fingertips.

“Look at you, even now. Innocent. You make work for yourself in the name of your own conscience, but my own duty is only the existence I cannot escape. The being that I am, which is Death.”

‘Cannot. Escape.’ Myrddin shivered then nudged him away, pushed him down to the ground and straddled him. He pressed his mouth against the smooth dip in Kas’ collarbone. “But you can’t escape me, either.”

“Nor do I want to.”

“I can guess what you want.” He slid off to one side and lay flat. The moss was cool and damp beneath the ancient fall of leaves. “You want…strawberries.”

Kas leaned over him, a darting movement. “Strawberries. You know better than that—” But Myrddin sat up, his fingers over Kas’ lips, and only smiled, distracted, when Kas licked at them, sucked the tips into his mouth. “My hawk. Where do you think you are flying away this time?”

“Something…someone is calling for me.” And he frowned. “That Pendragon, I expect. It’s in the wind, can you hear—?”

“Yes.” And though the lust was not disturbed from Kas’ expression, there was a sudden, uncertain sadness behind it. “Is it not what I said? You make work for yourself. Why would you do that, when it wasn’t so long ago that you chided me for my own duty? When you would have refused even the weight of your own power and its consequences?”

Myrddin pulled his fingers away from Kas’ mouth and kissed him instead. “Because I meant it when I said I wanted you forever. And I’ve been bored, and missing something to do in the mortal world. It’s the timing that’s inconvenient, I thought I would have longer, especially since…”

He smiled to himself and shook his head, hearing the memory of Uther’s words. ‘I have no need for sorcerers or omens, boy!’ Not really a lie, but not really the truth, either. The wind brought Myrddin another echo of the summons. Uther, the High King he’d given a red dragon omen and left behind, was not a patient man.

Though Myrddin was not bound to obey instantly, the call came too close on the heels of his worry about which direction the future would take. Was this one of the choices that would change his course, his purpose? He turned his head on Kas’ chest, restless, unwilling to move and uncertain of whether he should.

But this is connected to that earlier thing. My father, the dragon, lost in his own wild. And the memory…of the Spring vision. The tower. The Sword. A meeting—and those words. What else, after those words?

‘Son of no man.’

They had been a summons too, in their own way…but not like this. Eager memories tangled his thoughts in sticky intentions. What did he want, this Pendragon? Why now, so soon?

“This someone who is calling for you, you really must listen?” Kas’ words flowed warm across his shoulders. Myrddin turned and found himself caught in his lover’s arms.

“Yes. This time it’s my turn to go.” He paused, confused by the humor he found in the moment even now. “My turn to be summoned away.”

“I hear it. Did I not say? But I am surprised to find you giving such power to a mortal.”

“No lesser man than the High King of Britain.” He grinned as he said it, but the smile faded quickly as Kas stroked his hair.

“Why?”

“For the sake of peace, and my own conscience, and maybe…”

Kas gave a little tug to the strands still in his grasp. “You cannot stop what is coming. Not even you.”

Myrddin scowled and pressed his face against his lover’s chest. “Don’t pull my hair.”

“No? But that is not what you say when I take you.” And he stopped, ran his hands over the curve of Myrddin’s buttocks. “You have time before you leave me, do you not?”

“Always time for you.” He slipped out of Kas’ grasp and dropped onto his hands and knees. “Do what you want with me.”

Kas took Myrddin’s hips in his hands, bent over him and kissed the ridges of his spine. “What I want? That could take a while. This mortal king, he will have to wait his turn.”

Wait his—? Myrddin made a face. “No, thank you. I’ll have only you.”

“What a fool, to think that was what I meant. Even in jest, you would say that? As if I would let you, as if I would share you ever again.” The words were scalding, almost angry, but Kas’ hands were gentle, easy and eager both as he slipped them down to open him up.

“Kas. I don’t deserve—oh!” Kas crooked his fingers inside, stroked just the right spot, and Myrddin gasped out the rest of his words. “I don’t deserve you. I don’t—deserve—ohhh.”

Kas slid one hand up Myrddin’s spine and into his hair again, tugged his head back and bent by his ear. “No. You probably do not. No more than I deserve you.”

There was a hint of subtle humor in his voice, the suggestion that he meant his words both ways that they could be taken. Myrddin opened his mouth to protest, but Kas kissed him and suddenly he was groaning instead.

“It does not mean anything, Merlin. Deserve. You should know that better than I.”

“Ka-a-ahhh-ahh—” Slow, deep penetration. Cock, not fingers. Then slower. Deeper. Each thrust dragged out almost past bearing. But the sensation was intertwined irresistibly with Myrddin’s memories of every other time Kas had touched him, and with the fear of the future that went on compelling him.

Incongruous, and yet not so, Myrddin suddenly craved the taste of the strawberries he had teased Kas about. The taste of Kas, of his kiss…and strawberries. “Kas, let me—kiss me.” Myrddin glanced over his shoulder, twisted and met his lover’s lips as Kas leaned in, devouring his mouth with the intensity of the moment.

Kas sucked on his tongue and Myrddin bucked his hips forward, cock twitching in sympathetic sensation. He moaned against Kas’ lips, lifting himself to the slow, deep thrusts as he tried to keep his impatience contained. It wouldn’t do him any good, never did him any good, unless…

There was one word that always seemed to slip right past Kas’ defenses and get Myrddin what he wanted. “Please.”

Kas slid his hands up Myrddin’s sides in response, threaded one into his hair and dragged him near enough to kiss again.

Yes. “Please, please.”

He dragged the word out as long as he had breath. Kas licked at his lips, kissed the corner of his mouth, then a hot line from that kiss to a spot on his neck that made him shudder all over.

“Harder?” Kas slammed into him and his lips slipped down Myrddin’s neck. “More?” But Myrddin could barely breathe, gasped in air and let out a keening wail.

Kas laughed at him, not out of breath at all. His voice came soft and taunting, but only in play. “I should bring you just like this, before your British king. ‘Summoned him?’, I will say. ‘Summoned him? He is mine.’ And who would deny it, with you on your knees for me? What would he think of you then?”

 Myrddin shook his head, gasped out the only other word he could think of. “Love…”

“Yes. My hawk, my love.” Kas gripped his thighs and lifted without pulling out of him, turning him onto his side.

Myrddin clutched his lover’s hip and held him close while Kas caught one of his legs and pulled it over his shoulder.

“Please.” One pale hand and its slender fingers held Myrddin pinned, splayed over his ribs. He let his head drop to the ground and moaned. “Kas. Want you to—”

Something amused flickered in Kas’ face, in his eyes, and he let Myrddin writhe as he chose, onto his erection then up again, only so he could push himself down onto it. As if Kas would ever—as if he could—but the thought of being taken like that, shown off before a whole court of mortals, that red-faced king…

A burst of laughter was caught in Myrddin’s throat, trapped behind a moan. He tossed his head against the grass, wrapped his free leg around Kas and reached for his own cock. Kas let him, but the faster he stroked himself the slower his lover thrust into him. Counterpoint and tension, the pleasure spread into a tangled blossom of heat somewhere between Myrddin’s cock and the base of his spine.

He lifted his hips and Kas caressed him, his fingers a whisper over his nipples, down his sides. Myrddin arched and Kas let his leg down, leaned over him and mouthed his way from nipples to collarbone, from collarbone to the curve of his ear.

“Mine, you are. My hawk, my spring. I will not share you. I will leave my mark on you. On your throat and your red lips, and where else, love? Where else should I kiss you?”

“Ka…ahh. Ahh, ah—ah!”

“Here?” His tongue came wet and sudden against Myrddin’s chest, a lick of heat followed by teeth.

“Ohhh…”

“Or here?” Kas fastened his mouth around one nipple, sucked and bit gently.

“Kas! Please, I can’t, please.” Sensation separated Myrddin from everything but his own body, the pressure of Kas’ fingertips and the thick, full feeling of his cock stretching him as he thrust inside.

“If it was up to me I would kill you and keep you with me forever. Kill you and…”

“Do it, I—do it and—Kas.” The word came from him rich with pleasure, elongated by heat. Time had turned thin and insubstantial.

Kas’ mouth was hot as those unexpected summer days that come mid-autumn, and his pace was increasing, his fingers tight as talons around Myrddin’s wrists.

“Can’t wait for… Want our…rite. Our…”

“Yes. Just like this. Now, and always. Always, Merlin.”

Shuddering tension came into Kas’ thighs, his erection somehow bigger, harder, opening Myrddin up even more. The inevitable peak rushed toward him as Kas hitched him up and surged over him, drove into him more fiercely with every thrust.

His whole body tingled, every muscle clenched. Myrddin locked his legs around Kas’ hips and held him deep while his climax overwhelmed him. It was a lightning spike of pleasure that dragged a hoarse cry out of his throat, then another when Kas gave in to his own release.

Myrddin was still panting when he pushed his hair out of his eyes and grinned up at his lover. “Kas, I really do have to go—”

“‘Have to’. I do not like you talking this way. You have only talked this way…then.”

He dropped his eyes from Kas’ stare, the questions in it that he didn’t want to answer. “It’s not like you don’t leave me all the time because of—”

“My responsibilities are a part of my existence. The essence of it.” Kas chided him gently. “I could no more deny those duties, keep from passing the dead into the other world, than you could drain the Spring from your own blood.”

“I wish I…” But Myrddin smiled, wan and thin, and wrapped his arms around Kas, pressing his cheek to the soundless warmth of his chest. No heartbeat now. Just the silence that he had grown to love. “No. Never mind. How could I keep you then?”

“I will remember this moment.” Kas’ hands slid off his body like reluctant oil. “I will remember, and when he dies, this mortal—”

“Kas. You wouldn’t.” But he was both touched and amused by the possessive, serious way Kas stared at him.

“You think so? Perhaps I will not do to him the worst of it. Perhaps I will save that for…” He fell silent, and the black power rose thick and choking as smoke. “But I will not make his passing pleasant. He dared to summon you from me.” Myrddin disentangled himself from Kas’ fingers and started to dress himself, but Kas was not through. “If you are too long away from me, too long among mortals, I will come for you. I will take you away and then I truly will not share.”

Suddenly, Myrddin knew that Kas was just as afraid as he was, just as aware of the ominous cloud that seemed to thicken daily. Of the sense of danger to all that was most precious to both of them. “I love you. And when I’m through with Uther, with his court…when I know what he needs, and I’ve made the place I need, I’ll come find you. I don’t want to be away from you, Kas. I don’t want…”

He stared at the sky, couldn’t focus on the blistering stars. “My father came to Spring. To me. Before I came to you. He’s sleeping, Kas. The god of the wood is sleeping.” He turned then, and what he saw on his lover’s face almost broke his heart. Still the same shadows but no surprise.

“It is beginning.”

Myrddin clenched his fists until his nails bit into his palms. “Then I will make it stop.” He suffered Kas’ goodbye kiss, the cold, heavy heat of it, then turned and raced away.

* * * *

The forest was silent and too dark for the end of summer, but Aisling had grown used to that. How many months had it been since the world had followed its usual cycle? Since the seasons had progressed one after another as they should? More than a year now, since Dealla had slain the Spring Maiden and started a new cycle.

Death, instead of life.

Here, where the green border of the last living grove gave way to the gray that had overwhelmed the rest of Ireland, the difference drew her eye. But it wasn’t what she was supposed to be observing.

The hand that closed on her shoulder drew her attention where it belonged. “Princess. Carefully.”

Her companion was still, the muscles of his body taut with waiting. Cathán was the only one of those Lughaid had found to teach her how to hunt who’d had the patience to do the job. She was grateful for that, but she almost sighed at his address. ‘Princess’, still. After so many weeks. But the sigh wasn’t permitted, might scare away their quarry, so she restrained it.

She followed the line of Cathán’s gaze with her own stare. In the tangled branches across the empty clearing they had come to, a pair of bright eyes gleamed. A head became visible as Aisling watched.

It was a doe, lean with the long season of hunger, nibbling at the tips of the bare branches and the black bark.

She pitied the beast, but pity wouldn’t feed her people. She tightened her fingers on the spear in her hand, nodded when Cathán gestured with his own. Around from the sides? Yes. They’d have a better chance of a successful strike without the thorns in the way, and the branches around the doe, though bare of new leaves, were still thick enough to present a problem.

She obeyed the lessons she’d learned in practice. Listen to the messages of your body, the messages of the ground. Where were the safe spaces around her to tread? What did the breeze have to tell her as she stalked forward?

A step, then another. Aisling followed the curve of the thicket to the north and the west, watching Cathán make his way around the other side. One step at a time. She must remember to beware the rustling leaves and the shapes under them, roots waiting to snarl her feet, twigs that might crack and give away her intent.

Their prey lifted her head. The brown eyes of the doe focused on the distance while her ears twitched.

Aisling held her breath.

The deer lowered her head again, nibbled on the raw end of a stripped branch, and Aisling slid another step forward, then another. She was close now. The spear was heavy in her hand but she refused to shift its weight out of this best position. Sweat prickled her brow, but she ignored it for the sake of the kill.

Cathán stepped forward across from her. They locked eyes for an instant. He nodded, and Aisling thought a prayer at the same moment she skipped forward and flung her spear. There was a high-pitched squeal, loud as the heartbeat screaming in Aisling’s throat.

Cathán was waiting when she paced through the thicket, already crouched by the doe’s head with a knife in his hand. “Well done, princess.”

She laid her hand on the butt of the spear, then pulled it free and stared down as a jet of warm blood painted her hands with red. “How many times do I have to tell you? My name is Aisling. Use it.”

“It’s not my place.”

“No? What is your place, then? You’re the only one who had the patience to aid me, to deal with the weakness that was all the years of my life before now. The only one. Call me by my name. If anyone deserves to, you do.” Aisling saw how little impression she was making on him, and this time allowed herself the sigh.

Weeks of the same argument. Since Lughaid had demanded that someone help her feed the people. Feed them, before she asked of them…anything.

The children were as lean as the deer she’d slain, and their parents approaching skeletal. They had come in families, sometimes whole villages, all without hope. The refugees were still coming, swelling the encampment around the one green grove, though the flood had been reduced to a slow trickle.

Cathán met her eyes, defiant, then lowered his gaze and shrugged. “Princess, it’s because of you that there’s a people left to help. The Druids are content with their fires and their councils and their talk. Now that you feed them—”

“Now that I feed them, I’m expected to ask them to fight. Before my sister gets us all killed.” She thumbed the wet point of her spear. “Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if she was the one who would die first.”

“You wish this for her?” She saw a black spark in his eyes when she turned to peer up at his face.

“Wish it? I would kill her myself if I could.”

“Princess—”

“Aisling, Cathán.” She tightened her fist on the spear in her hand then shook her head and tried to loosen her shoulders. “We’ve work to do. You said it would make it easier if we left the offal here.”

“Yes. And it’s a fine beast for your first kill, prin—my lady.” He lifted an eyebrow at her.

Aisling only shrugged. “Better. I suppose we’ll just have to work on that along with everything else. Now. Give me your knife and show me what to do.”

The smell of blood grew heavy in the thicket while they worked. It attracted unruly attention out of the afternoon as the day darkened around them, skipping dusk and heading for the night.

“We should leave soon, my lady. Unless whatever protects you is something that does not need the light.”

She turned and scanned the wood behind them. There was nothing there that she could see, but that didn’t mean anything. The presence of someone or something watching was thick, almost oppressive. “I don’t know. I really don’t, it hasn’t been tested. Lughaid told me—”

There was a rustle as Cathán stirred beside her, shifting the doe. “Lughaid told everyone. You were marked by the Spring, and by the Summer before it. You were touched by the Green King himself. But I know something of the eight kingdoms, and it is Winter that hunts Ireland now.”

She turned, startled, so much so that the knife slipped and cut her thumb. “Ah!”

“Princess! Carefully. You are not to be hurt, that was not our arrangement.” He took her hand and wiped away the deer’s blood with the tunic let down around his hips.

Flushing, she looked away. “It was just an accident.” He was suddenly too close, and his skin radiated heat. But she couldn’t say that. He would never call her by name if she said that.

Cathan wiped away the blood spilling from her finger, too, then brought it to his mouth and sucked on it. Something in his face changed, something in his eyes, but Aisling didn’t move. He was…so close.

Too close.

The tip of his tongue moved over the stinging wound, but she didn’t feel pain. Something in his eyes… His mouth, his tongue, were making her hot inside. Then he let her go, and she blinked at where the cut on her finger had been—and now wasn’t.

“Cathán, you…” She reached up, touched his lips and stood frozen that way for a long moment, until she caught his gaze again, saw an amused sparkle in it and jerked her hand away. “You aren’t…you can’t be human.”

He blinked at her almost lazily then returned to gutting the deer with swift, clean movements. “Is that a problem, my lady?”

“N-No…I suppose not. But no one mentioned—doesn’t anyone know?”

A certain stiffness came into his shoulders. “The people of my village. We lived by the sea, and my mother came from the sea, and when I was old enough to understand she told my father and I it was time for her to go home.”

Cathán paused, elbows balanced on his thighs, and stared into the trees. “She asked if I would go with her. To dark Winter, the Red Kingdom. But my home was with my father. I live for the hunt, yes, but with a spear in my hand, not in a seal’s shape.”

Surprised, Aisling took a step forward then stopped. “Your mother was a selkie?”

“And my father was a man, and I have chosen his way of life. Yes.”

She eyed him silently then got to her knees and started to help him again with the carcass. “Not many would do that.”

“You think not?”

Shrugging, she wiped blood off her palms and onto the grass. “The lure of an immortal life is strong. Even my sister…”

“Dealla desires—”

Aisling laughed, shook her head and accepted the liver into her hands while he hauled out the steaming guts. “Not Dealla. Saoirse Saorla. My little sister… Dealla found her helping the sidhe. She was beaten, whipped. But the Red King came for her, freed her, took her away and now she is…”

“Unchanged, isn’t she? But not the same.”

It wasn’t a question, and Aisling shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know how to answer that. Changed? Not her face, not the shape of her. But she wore the thinnest dress, though it was Samhain and chill. She rode a horse that was more smoke than flesh. And the way she regarded me, the way her teeth flashed in her mouth…”

Cathán darted a glance in her direction. “Did she recognize you?”

Aisling hesitated. “Yes, but not at first.”

He shrugged. “So, you see? That enviable immortal life, it has its price. Maybe she was willing to pay it. I am not.”

Something like anger flashed through her, a sense of loss, magnified. “She’s just a child! She was only eight years old.”

“You should forget about her as she was, my lady. It might be better to forget she even exists.”

She shook her head as he strode away from the deer and crossed to the edge of the grove. Cathán cut down a few dead vines, testing them with a strong pull. He bound the legs of the doe to their spears, made sure the edible organs were secure in the carcass, and Aisling hefted her end without being asked.

“I can’t do that. Just forget her. I don’t want to forget her.”

Cathán shrugged, and her gaze lingered more on the lines of his shoulders as he did so than it should have. “I said it would be better, my lady. Not that I thought you would, or could.”